The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life

by Terryl L. Givens

Come, try again, He seems to be saying, like a patient tutor who knows his student’s mind is too frozen with fear to add the sums correctly.

we fall short of salvation, it will be because our cumulative choices, our freely made decision to reject His rescue, have put us beyond His reach, not because His patience has expired.

If some inconceivable few will persist in rejecting the course of eternal progress, they are “the only ones” who will be damned, taught Joseph Smith. “All the rest” of us will be rescued from the hell of our private torments and subsequent alienation from God. “All except” the intractable will be saved, for God will force no man to heaven.

The beauty of this story is in its intimation that any conception of heaven worth pursuing is inseparable from reconciliation—not just to God, but also to our loved ones, those of our household

and those of generations past.

“neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.”

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when He is revealed, we will be like Him.”

As long as it is God’s nature and character we are striving to emulate, and not His power and glory, we are on safe ground. As the apostle Peter recognized, the “precious and very great promises” given to us are that we “may become participants of the divine nature.”

The immense distance between the spiritual and the mundane collapses, and we find holiness in the ordinary.

“Divine families encircled by his fire and light are the very essence of life and eternal life; without them this earth—indeed this cosmos—will have missed the measure of its creation.”

Man was designed for a social being.”

Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in His image. God’s nature and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth. However rapturous or imperfect, fulsome or shattered, our knowledge of love has been, we sense it is the very basis and purpose of our existence. It is a belonging that we crave because it is one we have always known.

We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.

Jonathan Mayhew, “but it is advantageous no further than it . . . leads us to live an holy and godly life.” And that means a life that earnestly engages, rather than distracts us from, our ethical obligations to each other. Pure religion, said James, is to “care for widows and orphans,” not to sermonize about their plight.

This vision of heaven as the convergence of two societies, an earthly and a heavenly, is a beautiful template for the work we face as humans: fitting ourselves, our families, our communities, to be participants in a celestial society. What this means is that our present relationships are both the laboratory in which we labor to perfect ourselves and the source of that enjoyment that will constitute our true heaven.

Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness. Patience is only manifest when another

calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control. What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point. The confusion is understandable, since our current generation’s preference for “spirituality” over “religion” is often a sleight of hand that confuses true discipleship with self-absorption.

We may think a leaping child, in the euphoria of his imagination, enjoys unfettered freedom when he tells us he is going to land on the moon. But the rocket scientist hard at work in the laboratory, enmeshed in formulae and equations she has labored to master, and slaving away in perfect conformity with the laws of physics, is the one with true freedom: for she will land on the moon; the boy will not.

Salvation is a process, not an event.

“The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful . . . whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.”

This is fortunate, since love is what occurs in the face of difference, not sameness.

The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same—they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy. Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.

We believe in a heaven—and heavenly inhabitants—that are dynamic, not

static, in their existence. Nothing in the ever-evolving cosmos God has fashioned, nothing in the relentless self-perfecting processes of species and individuals, nothing in the insatiable longings of the human heart, suggests otherwise.

What if in our anxious hope of heaven, we find we have blindly passed it by, like Wordsworth blazing past the alpine summit? What if the possibilities of Zion were already here, and its scattered elements all about us? A child’s embrace, a companion’s caress, a friend’s laughter are its materials. Our capacity to mourn another’s pain, like God’s tears for His children; our desire to lift our neighbor from his destitution, like Christ’s desire to lift us from our sin and sorrow—these are not to pass away when the elements shall melt with fervent heat. They are the stuff and substance

of any Zion we build, any heaven we inherit. God is not radically Other, and neither is His heaven.

The New Testament makes the point that those mortals who operate in the grey area between conviction and incredulity are in a position to choose most meaningfully, and with most meaningful consequences.